The Fat Angel Sings

Carolina Faruolo (ex-Los Bitchos) and Danny Lee Blackwell (Night Beats) had been friends and mutual admirers of each other’s musical projects for years, though with Faruolo residing in the UK and Blackwell residing in Texas, their interactions were limited. Yet as was so often the case for many of us during the shelter-in-place stretches of 2020, geographic proximity wound up being a non-issue as our socializations became almost exclusively online endeavors. In this era of isolation and uncertainty, Faruolo and Blackwell invented their own private escape to Latin rhythms, colorful vistas, and smoky revelries under the project name of Abraxas. Combining their shared love of Wendy Renee, Los Destellos, doo-wop and R&B, they crafted their debut album “Monte Carlo” by bouncing ideas across the Atlantic.

“Planet Abraxas” is a world filled with jungles, mist-covered rivers, panthers lurking in the night, desolate shopping malls, Neolithic citadels and sand-worn walls,” Blackwell says of the muse behind “Monte Carlo”. “The nights are usually dense with fog and the air is filled with the sounds of cicadas and faraway drumming.” This visual manifestation of their sound stands in stark contrast to the environment in which the songs were written. “I remember the feeling I got the first time Danny added vocals to one of my tracks,” Faruolo recalls. “I was sitting on my sofa in rainy Manchester in the middle of winter. I pressed play and the song just made my heart jump. It instantly felt special and, more importantly, it felt like a perfect portrait of both of us.”

Uruguayan-born Faruolo grew up with the tropical beats of cumbia and the psychedelic flavor of classic chicha artists, and it became her mission to infuse those sunny influences in her work as a UK musician. Blackwell’s work under the Night Beats handle involves the fusion of outlaw soul and R&B with a resourceful DIY spirit. Despite the apparent contrast in their styles, the two musicians bonded over their reverence for Selena and Sade, exemplars of the humid pulse and sultry spirit of their respective approaches. As Abraxas, their distinctive musical perspectives created a sound that encompassed the tropicalia of Os Mutantes, the scrappy songwriting of Cleaners From Venus, and the trippy production of Lee “Scratch” Perry, though the duo is quick to assert that they were finding their own distinctive voices rather than adhering to pre-existing stylistic codes and constraints. And indeed, “Monte Carlo” feels rooted in tradition but blossoms into its own unique timbres and vibrations.

“Monte Carlo” opens with “Sunrise State (of Mind),” where a hypnotic cumbia beat serves as the bedrock for cosmic guitar leads, hazy choral melodies, and Blackwell’s seductive vocals. From there, the album continues its steady Latin pulse on “Mañana,” a perfect soundtrack to feverish nights in dancehalls, sipping on caipirinhas and sharing cigarettes with strangers on the dancefloor.

Across its twelve tracks, “Monte Carlo” unfurls a myriad of exotic influences, from the Eastern melodies and guitar trills on “Sultan,” through the dub-inflected stomp and scorching fuzz of “La Estampida,” and on to the Anatolian psych-funk of album closer “Göbekli Tepe.”

Blackwell recorded his contributions with the assistance of engineer Chris Maciel at his studio the 22nd Dimension in Pomona, California and Faruolo recorded her parts in Manchester, England at Brunswick Mill. While Abraxas conceived their material in bedrooms and studios six timezones apart, the music on “Monte Carlo” sounds like a live band in the throes of an ecstatic performance. And Abraxas plans to make the live incarnation of the band a reality when conditions allow for it. Until then, listeners can bask in the invented world of Abraxas and all its exotic and enticing splendor across the twelve tracks of “Monte Carlo”. Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to present “Monte Carlo” to the world. 

released October 28th, 2022

Los Angeles punk quartet The Paranoyds channel revelry and revulsion into their debut album “Carnage Bargain”—a raucous blend of garage rock grit, new wave swagger, horror film soundtrack campiness, and a myriad of other influences.

The Paranoyds’ beginnings can be traced back to a friendship forged between Staz Lindes and Laila Hashemi in their teens. With the additions of Lexi Funston and David Ruiz, the band found the personnel for their sonic balance of jubilant energy and foreboding undercurrents.

“Carnage Bargain” captures this chemistry through guitar-and-keyboard, genre-mashing weirdness on “Laundry,” the fever-dream kitsch of B-52s on “Ratboy,” krautrock’s motorik groove on “Hungry Sam”, and Blondie on the sweet-and-salty highlight “Courtney.”

Title track “Carnage Bargain” is a perfect example of the band delivering scathing lyrical observations under the guise of a quirky pop hook. The notion of rejecting the status quo and creating your own destiny is evident on the lead single “Girlfriend Degree,” which the band calls an ode to “being a badass woman who’s taking time to make sure she’s doing things for herself.” The band may be paranoid, but they offer a solution to our modern ills through the act of being an inspiring, independent, and unflappable force.

Originally Released September 13th, 2019

“Suck My Shirt” is the fourth full-length for The Coathangers. “It’s a balance between overthinking and just going for it,” guitarist Crook Kid (Julia Kugel) says of their songwriting strategy. It’s a duality immediately apparent with the album opener “Follow Me.” It’s a classic Coathangers tune with Stephanie Luke’s raspy vocals belted out over their signature ragged garage-rock. But the chorus opens into one of the most accessible hooks in the band’s canon, just before segueing into the next verse with a squall of violent dissonant guitar. From there the band launches into “Shut Up,” a title that harkens back to the brash sass of their first record. The song still has its spikey guitar riffs and shouted chorus, but here The Coathangers sound less like a jubilant version of Huggy Bear and more like the art-pop of late-era Minutemen.

Dedicated Coathangers fans will recognize the re-worked versions of “Merry Go Round,” “Smother,” “Adderall,” and “Derek’s Song” from their run of limited edition split 7″s, and hearing them in the context of the album shows that these tracks weren’t merely isolated examples of the band’s more sophisticated side, but were actually demonstrative of the group’s increasing capacity for nestling solid melodic hooks and rock heft into their repertoire. By the time the band wraps up the album with the humble pop perfection of “Drive,” it’s hard to believe this was the band that garnered their reputation off of raucous bombasts like “Don’t Touch My Shit.”.

Originally released March 18th, 2014

This is the 4th album from Deer Tick and a pivotal moment for the band. With a couple lineup changes over the years, they started to speed things up a bit on “Divine Providence”; not that they shed their blues-tinged country rock sound entirely, but the album has an even split of fast stompers and mid-tempo country bar howls. The original 12 songs on the album are about as close as you can get to a beer drenched show with the band; the addition of the 5 songs from the “Tim” EP and the 12 bonus tracks of alternate versions, outtakes and rarities make for a close encounter with a lost weekend with the band. The original album was produced by Adam Landry and Justin Collins, and this edition was remixed by Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, RI, and remastered by John Baldwin at John Baldwin Mastering in 2022.

“Divine Providence” 11th Anniversary Edition will be out on November. 11th

This song sounds as though the members of Yo La Tengo were challenged to make something that would answer the question “what’s so special about Yo La Tengo?” and absolutely nailed the assignment. Yo La Tengo have written a lot of different types of songs through the years but this one really gets to the core of their identity – Ira Kaplan’s distinctive guitar tone and the way he strangles notes out of his instrument in a way that introduces a bit of manic violence to a fuzziness that would otherwise feel cozy, the contrast of a low-key nearly deadpan quality in the vocals with an obvious warmth and sincerity. “Fallout” sounds like it’s in the sweet spot of their mid-90s run of albums “Painful”, “Electr-O-Pura”, and “I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One”, but it doesn’t sound like a self-conscious return to anything. It’s just the logical outcome of moving from the cut-and-paste construction of their last full album to something very live and raw, and this is just what they’re like when they get in that mode. It’s muscle memory, it’s core competencies, it’s a musical identity honed for over 30 years.

John Darnielle has written almost 600 songs now, and some of them are very sad, dealing with hard drugs and tragic ends, hurting yourself and others, sicknesses of both body and brain, off-brand alcohols. They are told in beautiful, unnerving, specific detail because he is a very good writer, and also some of them are just true stories about his own life.

“Jordan Lake 5” found us preparing for the Bleed Out tour and playing the songs together for the first time since recording them. We had been waiting a year to let these songs out of the cage and it was a pleasure to set them loose! Available to name your price today only on Bandcamp – along with other select albums.

releases November 18th, 2022

Follow the story of the first American singer/songwriter to sign to the Asylum label, Judith Lynne Sill released two albums and nearly completed the third before dying of an overdose in 1979.

On November 13th, a new documentary about 1970s singer/songwriter Judee Sill will premiere in New York as part of the 2022 DOC NYC Festival. Titled “Lost Angel: The Genius Of Judee Sill” features interviews with Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Shawn Colvin, and David Geffen (who discovered Sill), as well as younger musicians such as Adrianne Lenker, Weyes Blood, and Fleet Foxes.

It charts her life from a troubled adolescence of addiction, armed robbery and prison through her meteoric rise in the music world and early tragic death. In two years, Judee went from living in a car, to an Asylum Record deal and the cover of Rolling Stone. As told by David Geffen, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash — along with Judee herself — the film explores Judee’s unique musical style and the inspiring recent rediscovery of her singular music by many young artists today.

Signed to Geffen’s Asylum Records, Sill released two albums in the early ’70s before dying of a drug overdose in 1979 at the age of 35. The film examines Sill’s early life and music as well as her personal struggles with addiction and being incarcerated.

Sill was influenced by Bach, while lyrically her work drew substantially on Christian themes of rapture and redemption

Judith Lynne Sill (October 7th, 1944 – November 23rd, 1979) was an American singer and songwriter. The first artist signed to David Geffen’s Asylum label, she released two albums on Asylum and partially completed a third album before dying of a drug overdose in 1979. Her eponymous debut album was released in late 1971 and was followed about 18 months later by “Heart Food”. In 1974, she recorded demos for a third album, which never was completed. The demos were released posthumously with other rarities on the 2005 two-disc collection “Dreams Come True”.

Lily Konigsberg wrote “Sweat Forever,” one of the singles from her forthcoming full-length album, “Lily We Need to Talk Now”, in the heat of a moment when her life felt upside down and a longtime relationship was ending. “I’m still here / Is that what you wanted?” she sings, with light and clarity that belies the true sadness of that sticky refrain. The song is propelled by the feathery strum of a 12-string guitar (one gifted to her while she was working at the Gym, a Brooklyn mutual-aid hub), her playful vocal asides, and crisp, detail-oriented production by Nate Amos (Water From Your Eyes, My Idea).

“Lily We Need to Talk Now” is a record Konigsberg has been slowly chipping away at since 2016, revising and re-recording the songs over the years. The eleven-track collection is her first proper full-length, following her anthology of EPs and unreleased tracks  The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, released in 2021 by Wharf Cat Records.

The new record is catchy the whole way through, like much of the poppy and plainspoken indie rock output that’s made her a fixture of the NYC underground in recent years. Her voice twists and turns and dashes around her clever wordplay in new ways here; there are hints of power pop, pop punk, and downtempo introspection, all dotted with easter eggs of winking humor. She’s joined by many of her longtime collaborators: Andrea Schavelli, with whom she released the 2017 split “Good Time Now”; Matt Norman, with whom she has collaborated in the avant-pop duo Lily and Horn Horse for years; Paco Cathcart, of the Cradle, who produced her 2020 EP It’s “Just Like All the Clouds”; and Nina Ryser, with whom she plays in the acclaimed art-punk trio Palberta. But it’s her collaboration with Amos that makes the most notable new additions.

True to its title (taken from a text message sent to Konigsberg by Amos), this collection of songs is like a check-in with herself. On “That’s the Way I Like It,” with backing vocals from Cathcart, Konigsberg reflects on the feeling of struggling with a loved one. “You can get all evil about it—like a brat, like a baby,” she says. On “Proud Home,” she sings one of the record’s boldest earworm hooks (“You’ve got a lot of fucking things to be proud of!”) and tries to comfort a friend who has a crush on her mom. “I really cracked myself up with the lyrics,” she says. “It’s kind of a ‘Stacy’s Mom’ riff. I decided it’s a dedication to Adam Schlesinger [of Fountains of Wayne].” But Konigsberg’s lyrics aren’t happy all of the time. “There’s a lot of sadness or strangeness in them,” she says. “This album is clearly about breaking up with somebody that I love. But, in all of my music, there’s humor. I don’t take myself too seriously.” 

Konigsberg’s sense of humor is on display in “Hark,” an infectious and light-hearted track about the frustrations of songwriting. It was originally written for her quarantine project with Palberta bandmate Ani Ivry-Block, Forever. “I hate the fact that I belong to something that needs my help or else it will die,” she sings gracefully about her unfinished tunes, before joking, “You can look, but don’t touch / That part’s a mess / Leave it to me,” backed by a bouncy bassline and horns, her voice occasionally wrapped in a touch of autotune. “It’s an odd song but weirdly catchy,” she says. “My musical life is kind of encapsulated in it.” 

Konigsberg has been writing songs all her life. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she started playing solo sets around NYC clubs as a teenager, before linking up with Bard classmates Ryser and Ivry-Block to form Palberta. “They’re the reason that I’m such a confident performer,” Konigsberg says about her Palberta bandmates. “We learned to perform together, and now I’m genuinely not scared when I go onstage. They’re my sisters, and they inspire me to just do me.” Despite this being her namesake project, Konigsberg’s biggest influences remain her friends and collaborators, and the project generally has the feeling of a collective effort. “I just love all of my friends, and I’m really happy that some of them are part of the record. Charlie, Hugo, Nina, Paco, Andrea, Matt, Nate. They inspire me a lot.”

“Lily We Need to Talk Now” explores the rollercoaster of grief that accompanies a heartbreak—and the rush of exciting things that come next. The album ends aptly with “True,” a cathartic, high-energy rocker that Konigsberg says captures “the feeling that you can’t live without someone—but you can.” She compares the end of a relationship to a death. “You can’t imagine someone in your life not being there, and then they’re not there. And sometimes you’re happy and laughing, and sometimes you’re mourning. But life does go on.” 

released October 29th, 2021

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Show 475:
1. Slowdive-Souvlaki Space Station
2. Σtella-Charmed
3. Just Mustard-Still-
4. The Smile-The Smoke
5. Batts-All That I Need
6. Kids on a Crime Spree-Goods Get Got
7. Deadheading-Break
8. Jeremy Ivey-Orphan Child-Invisible Pictures-Anti-
9. Warpaint-Champion-Radiate Like This-Virgin
10. Jasmyn-Crystal Ball-In the Wild-Anti-
11. The Fabulous Five- Janie Made a Monster-single-King Records
12. Lydia Lunch-Spooky-Queen of Siam- Atavistic
13. Gnarls Barkley-Boogie Monster-St Elsewhere-Warner Bro

Is there a better pairing of kindred spirits than a split seven-inch single featuring Le Butcherettes and Death Valley Girls? We’re hard pressed to think of one. Sure, the interaction is fleeting, but damn is it satisfying. We’ve got Le Butcherettes on side A taking on one of Death Valley Girls’ most cosmic numbers, the kaleidoscopic centerpiece off “Under the Spell of Joy” album, “The Universe.” Le Butcherettes’ fearless and charismatic mastermind Teri Gender Bender takes the tune into even trippier territories, replicating the original song’s sonic tapestry of synth, sax, and guitars with layer upon layer of vocals.

Only the sparse accompaniment of acoustic guitar and modest percussion keeps the song from being fully a capella. It’s a perfect interpretation of Death Valley Girls’ communal and choral aims.

On side B, Death Valley Girls offer up a new tune—the deliciously ecstatic “When I’m Free.” Like every great Death Valley Girls song, it’s a celebration of life bolstered by fiery rock n’ roll riffage, spiritual organ, dizzying sax, and Bonnie Bloomgarden’s defiant and triumphant vocals. Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to offer up this meeting of mystical minds on vinyl and digital platforms. The one-time vinyl pressing is limited to 1000 copies (700 on Space Junk Splatter, 300 on Inner Ascension).

Released January 18th, 2022